Civil Rights Movement In The 1960's

The civil rights movement in the 1960’s was constantly faced with resistance and struggle everywhere it went. In the South, the protestors lives were constantly at risk due to the violent reactions from the police and others townspeople. As the movement began moving up North in hope of gaining more economic equality, it was faced with a more complex and less obvious form of racism that dominated the north. Due to the more subtle forms of racism in the North, the meaningless changes officials made for show, and the complex systems set in place to disadvantage blacks, progress in making gains for the civil rights movement was harder in the North than the South. The civil rights movement was more challenging in the North partly because of the

Northern cities would designate specific areas where black lived and cut all city services from those areas, which was called redlining. Those places that were redlined would become slums from lack of care from the city. By creating the slums where only blacks lived, the city would associate these disgustings areas with the people who lived there. Africans Americans were stuck in an endless loop, for there was no way to escape these awful living conditions. Even if an African American had the money to move any nice white neighborhood he or she moved into would quickly be torn apart and created into a slum in the process called blockbusting where real estate agents would push white owners to sell before the blacks would ‘ruin their neighborhood’(Fischer 4/11/16). These systems were impossible to break, which made it more difficult to make gains than it was in the South where these systems were not as prominent. With no clear solution to fix these problems the movement took much longer to actually make a difference in the northern cities. The fact that the problem is still relevant today with blacks living in the poorer parts of cities reveals the daunting task civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King were faced